Damage to Force (in Newtons or any other unit)

[Polydamas]

Some versions of D&D embrace "hit points as abstraction" by having nasty effects work on a certain number of Hit Dice or Hit Points of victim. Its a little hard to explain why the death spell can kill 20 veterans or 100 raw recruits, but its hard to explain everything about death spells.

Originally Posted by DouglasCole

Luke (the author of the above model) is very sharp. The model I created is entirely empirical, however. I took variables such as mass, velocity, sectional density, caliber, and real-world penetration of RHA steel in tests, plus a few others and put them into a polynomial model including interaction parameters, then "improved" the model by throwing out terms until something that was "good enough" was derived. The process I used is familiar to anyone who has done this sort of thing looking to build a phenomenological model from data.

Yes, one issue is that I am an empiricist not a rationalist, so I'm more comfortable with things derived from experiments than things purely derived from principles. But I can't obtain Luke's sources and my calculus is rusty and most importantly I don't have experience making first-principle physics models and judging what simplifying assumptions are reasonable.